Explore More

It has been nearly two months since the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) sparked an international crisis with a major attack inside Turkey, and it has been more than six weeks since President Bush promised Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Washington would aid Turkey’s fight against terrorism. Heady talk of intelligence sharing and cooperation followed and, indeed, may have been a factor in this weekend’s Turkish air strikes on PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. Yet at the same time, the Bush administration—more precisely, its increasingly assertive State Department—has embraced an ill-advised diplomatic strategy toward the PKK that will likely backfire on our long-standing NATO ally and could serve to undermine what is left of Bush’s global war on terrorism.